Elisa Silva
Elisa Silva is the director and founder of Enlace Arquitectura, (est. 2007) a multidisciplinary professional practice in architecture, urban design and landscape architecture, and Enlace Foundation (est. 2017), an NGO that promotes environmental, cultural and educational programs of social inclusion and participatory design collaborations. Enlace’s work has been recognized in numerous design competitions, exhibitions and international biennials including the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize 2022, the Biennale di Venezia 2021, the Chicago Architecture Biennial 2021, Arc en Rêve centre d’architecture in Bordeaux 2022, Centro Cultural Parque de España in Rosario Argentina 2022, Miami Art Basel FIU Gallery 2022, the XI and VIII Ibero American Architecture and Urban Design Biennial and the XX Architecture Biennial in Chile.
Elisa is an American-Venezuelan architect, with a Master of Architecture from Harvard GSD. Her practice and research challenge prejudiced narratives that support spatial inequality and engage communities in establishing long-term independent, local associations to sustain improvements in their livelihood and environment through collaborative programs. Communities include the barrio La Palomera and the Guaire River in Caracas Venezuela, rural villages in Oaxaca Mexico and Little Haiti in Miami Florida. These efforts have been supported by grants from the Swiss, French and US Embassies in Venezuela, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Harvard University David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Roma Burgau Germany, the Mellon Foundation and private donations. Elisa is the author of seminal publications on barrios and public space including CABA Cartography of the Caracas Barrios (FE 2015) and Pure Space: expanding the public sphere through public space transformations in Latin-American spontaneous settlements (Actar 2020). Her writings have also been published by Park Books, Birkhäuser, Actar, Arquine, Metropolis Magazine, Azure, Brooklyn Rail, Rassegna di Architettura e Urbanistica, NESS.doc, forA on the Urban, Manifest Journal and Venezuelan journals. Elisa has received the Rome Prize from the American Academy, the Wheelwright Fellowship from Harvard, Graham Foundation Grants in 2017 and 2021 and the Lucas Artist Fellowship. She is Associate Professor at Florida International University FIU with a joint appointment at the Wolfsonian Public Humanities Lab and the Department of Architecture. She has also taught at Harvard GSD, Princeton University School of Architecture, the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Design at the University of Toronto, the Simón Bolívar University and the Central University in Venezuela.
David Adjaye
David Adjaye OBE is recognized as a leading architect of his generation. Adjaye was born in Tanzania to Ghanaian parents. In 1994 he set up his first office, where his ingenious use of materials and his sculptural ability established him as an architect with an artist’s sensibility and vision.
In 2000, the newly formed Adjaye Associates immediately won several prestigious commissions including the Nobel Peace Centre (2005). In the United States, Adjaye designed the new home for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver (2007), two public libraries in Washington DC (2012), and several innovative residential projects, including a social housing scheme in New York’s Sugar Hill (2014). In 2009 a team led by Adjaye was selected to design the new $360 million Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall in Washington DC. Adjaye Associates’ largest completed project to date is the £160 million Moscow School of Management Skolkovo (2010).
Adjaye frequently collaborates with contemporary artists on art and installation projects including The Upper Room, with paintings by Chris Ofili (2002), which is now in the permanent collection of Tate Britain.
Adjaye has taught at the Royal College of Art, where he previously studied, and at the Architectural Association School in London, and has held distinguished professorships at the universities of Pennsylvania, Yale and Princeton. He is the John C. Portman Design Critic in Architecture at Harvard. He was awarded the OBE for services to architecture in 2007, received the Design Miami/Year of the Artist title in 2011 and the Wall Street Journal Innovator Award in 2013.
Material from Adjaye’s ten-year study of the capital cities of Africa was shown in an exhibition at the Design Museum, London (2010). He is now collaborating with Haus der Kunst in Munich and the Art Institute of Chicago on a comprehensive retrospective exhibition.
Image courtesy Ed Reeve
Krzysztof Wodiczko
Krzysztof Wodiczko is Professor in Residence of Art, Design and the Public Domain, Emeritus at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University.
He is renowned for his large-scale slide and video projections on architectural facades and monuments. He has realized more than 90 of such public projections and installations in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, England, Turkey, Germany, Holland, Northern Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States.
Since the late 1980s, his projections have involved the active participation of marginalized and estranged city residents. Simultaneously, and also internationally (England, Finland, France, Poland, Holland, Japan, Northern Ireland, Spain, Sweden and the US) he has been designing and implementing a series of nomadic instruments and vehicles with homeless, immigrant, and war veteran operators for their survival and communication.
Wodiczko’s work has been exhibited in Documenta (twice), Paris Biennale, Sydney Biennale, Lyon Biennale, The Venice Art Biennale (Canadian and Polish Pavilions) in Magiciens de la Terre exhibition, Paris, Venice Biennale of Architecture, The Whitney Biennial, Yokohama Triennale, International Center for Photography Triennale, New York, The Montreal Biennale ( 2014), The Liverpool Biennale ( 2016) and other international art festivals and international exhibitions. In 2009, he represented Poland in the Venice Biennale. In 2017, Wodiczko has held a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul.
Since 1985, he held many major retrospectives at such institutions as the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Boston, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum Sztuki, Lodz; Fundacio Tapies, Barcelona; Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford CT; La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Contemporary Art Center, Warsaw; the Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, DOX Contemporary Art Center, Prague, Muzeum Sztuki Lodz, Poland ( 2015) and in FACT Foundation for Art Culture and Technology in Liverpool (2016).
He is a recipient of the Hiroshima Art Prize in 1998 “for his contribution as an international artist to world peace”.
Wodiczko’s books include Critical Vehicles: Writings, Projects, Interviews published by MIT Press (1999), a large monograph of his works titled Krzysztof Wodiczko (2012), September 11: City of Refuge (2009), The Abolition of War(2013) by Black Dog Publishing, London, followed by expanded Polish edition under the title Obalenie Wojenby MOCAK ( 2014 ). Guests by Charta (2009), and a comprehensive collection of his writings titled Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings (2016) by Black Dog Publishing, London.
Krzysztof Wodiczko’s work has been presented as a part of PBS television series Art 21, Art in the Twenty-First Century: Season III.
Michael Van Valkenburgh
Michael R. Van Valkenburgh, Charles Eliot Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture, Emeritus, has taught at the GSD since 1982. He served as program director from 1987-89 and for a term as chairman of the department from 1991-96.
As founding principal of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc. (MVVA), with offices in New York City and Cambridge, Van Valkenburgh has designed a wide range of project types ranging from intimate gardens to full-scale urban design undertakings. Some of his recent projects include Brooklyn Bridge Park in New York City, the Lower Don Lands in Toronto, and the Monk’s Garden at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Most recently, the firm has been commissioned to design the landscape for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago and master plan the 308-acre Dorothea Dix Park in Raleigh. MVVA has received numerous design awards, including ASLA Firm of the Year in 2016 and the Brendan Gill Prize from the Municipal Art Society of New York in 2010 for Brooklyn Bridge Park, which is presented annually to the work of art that best captures the spirit and energy of New York City.
Van Valkenburgh was the 2003 recipient of the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Environmental Design, and in 2010 became the second landscape architect in history to receive the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for contributions to architecture as an art. In 2011 he was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, where he is one of only three landscape architects on its roster of members. He is also a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and the ASLA.
Van Valkenburgh earned a BS in Landscape Architecture from Cornell University and an MLA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2008, Yale University Press published Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates: Reconstructing Urban Landscapes, a book on his firm’s work. Van Valkenburgh’s approach to creating landscapes and public spaces has also been featured in a wide range of publications, most notably Art in America and Harvard Magazine .
Mack Scogin
Mack Scogin, Kajima Professor in Practice of Architecture, Emeritus at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, is a principal in the firm of Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects, in Atlanta, Georgia. At GSD, he was the chairman of the Department of Architecture from 1990 to 1995. He offered instruction in the core studio sequence and in advanced studio options. Recent studios have included: Everybody loves Frank, Field Trip, “My Way”—A Trip to Gee’s Bend, Symmetrical Performance, “Empathy”, 13141516171819, Beige Neon, and Doing and Dancing.
With Merrill Elam, he received the 1995 Academy Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a 1996 Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design, the 2006 Boston Society of Architects Harleston Parker Medal and a 2008 Honorary Fellowship in the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). Projects by Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects have received over fifty design awards including six national American Institute of Architects Awards of Excellence. Their work has been widely featured in popular and academic publications on architecture including the 1992 Rizzoli publication, Scogin Elam and Bray: Critical Architecture / Architectural Criticism, the 1999 University of Michigan publication Mack & Merrill and the 2005 Princeton Architectural Press publication Mack Scogin Merrill Elam: Knowlton Hall. Their work has been exhibited at many museums and galleries including: Museum of Modern Art; Walker Art Center; Wexner Center for the Arts; Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, Spain; Deutches Architektur Museum in Frankfurt, Germany; and the Global Architecture Gallery in Tokyo, Japan.
Notable projects include the new United States Federal Courthouse in Austin, Texas; New Student Housing at Syracuse University; the Yale University Health Services Center; the Gates Center for Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University; the Lulu Chow Wang Campus Center and Davis Garage for Wellesley College; the Knowlton School of Architecture for The Ohio State University; the Jean Gray Hargrove Music Library for the University of California at Berkeley; the Herman Miller Cherokee Operations Facility in Canton, Georgia; the Zhongkai Sheshan Villas in Shanghai, China and a variety of projects for Tishman Speyer Properties in New York City; Washington DC; Atlanta, Georgia and Hyderabad, India.
Martha Schwartz
Martha Schwartz is a landscape architect, urbanist, and climate activist. Her work and teaching focuses on the urban public realm landscape and its importance in making cities “climate ready”. For more than 40 years, she and the firm, Martha Schwartz Partners, have completed projects around the globe, from site-specific art installations to public spaces, parks, master-planning and reclamation. Schwartz is now engaged in strategic land-use and landscape planning in assisting leadership in their preparation for effects of climate change that their city will be facing in the near future.
Ms. Schwartz is a founder and participant of the GSD Climate Change Working Group, which gave shape to the first ever required climate change course to incoming students in 2020. She also has mounted a seminar in conjugation with Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Science on the topic of geoengineering.
Schwartz foresees landscape architecture as the leading profession to face the challenge of Climate Change. At the Landscape Architecture Foundation’s 2016 “New Landscape Declaration” summit on Landscape Architecture and the Future, Martha’s “Declaration” on climate change became the key proponent of the industry’s current position that Climate Change is a central issue to the practice.
She is a founding member of the Working Group of Sustainable Cities at the Harvard University Center for the Environment, a founding member of the Landscape Architecture Foundation ‘s “Working Group on Climate Change”, and has recently founded MAYDAY. Earth, a non-profit organization focused on Climate Communications and Education for non-scientists and generalists about Nature Based and Geoengineering Solutions which act at a global scale and can be integrated into practice, thus expanding the role of landscape architecture.
Awarded the 2020 ASLA Design Medal, Ms. Schwartz is the recipient of numerous international recognitions, including the Honorary Royal Designer for Industry Award from the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce for her outstanding contribution to UK design; the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award; the Women in Design Award for Excellence from the Boston Society of Architects; an Honorary Doctor of Science from the University of Ulster in Belfast, Ireland; a fellowship from the Urban Design Institute; visiting residencies at Radcliffe College and the American Academy in Rome; an Honorary Fellowship from the Royal Institute of British Architects; the Council of Fellows Award by the American Society of Landscape Architects and most recently a Doctor Honoris Causa from the Boston Architectural College.
Megan Panzano
Megan Panzano is Program Director of the Harvard Undergraduate Architecture Studies Track and Lecturer in Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD) where she coordinates and teaches design studios and representation courses in the graduate and undergraduate programs.
The design research and built work of her independent practice, studioPM, addresses architectures across a range of scales that are progressive through their interplay of images, objects, and space in the production of more inclusive, open-ended forms of subjectivity.
Panzano has taught architecture studio, concurrent with practice, for the past ten years. She is the recipient of a variety of awards for her architectural and pedagogical work including a ‘Best Parks’ honor for her design of a perceptual playground for unscripted play built on the roof of a preschool, a solo exhibition of her project ‘Architectural Artifacts’ at Boston’s pinkcomma gallery, a HILT Spark grant supporting new forms of learning through making, a pair of Harvard GSD Dean’s Junior Faculty Grants for original design research projects, and four sequential Harvard Excellence in Teaching awards. Her design work has been published in Mark Magazine, Wallpaper, Bauwelt, Architect, PLAT, Arch Daily, Domus, the Boston Globe, the Harvard Gazette, and Harvard Design Magazine and has been exhibited in numerous domestic and international academies and galleries.
As GSD faculty, Panzano has authored original core studio briefs and design courses within both the graduate and undergraduate programs. In 2018, she advised MArch II GSD Thesis Prize winner, Scarlet Ziwei Song, for her project, “Not so skin deep: vernacularism in XL.” In the spring of 2020, Megan’s original Core IV housing studio brief, “Collected Company,” supported the winning project of the Harvard 2020 Clifford Wong Prize in Housing Design, “A House is Not a Home,” by Qin Ye Chen (MArch I 2022) and Yiwen Wang (MArch I AP 2022). She has also served as an invited design critic at UCLA, USC, Columbia, Cornell, University of Pennsylvania, Yale, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Wesleyan, Temple University, RISD, Northeastern University, Wellesley, Boston Architectural College, and MIT.
Prior to joining the GSD, Panzano taught studio at Northeastern University. She has practiced in Boston as a Senior Designer and Project Manager at Utile, Inc. and in Philadelphia at Venturi, Scott Brown + Associates, where she worked closely with both Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi. She holds a B.A. in Architecture with honors from Yale University and a Master of Architecture with distinction from the GSD, where she was the recipient of the John E. Thayer Award for outstanding academic achievement and the 2010 winner of the GSD’s James Templeton Kelley Thesis Prize for her thesis design of a new architectural type that explored the home as an inhabitable archive – an integral site of object collection and collective living.
Panzano is the mother of two boisterous boys, whose energies she and her husband, Vince, direct as often as possible to involved, collaborative renovation projects of their 1929 home in Arlington, MA, just west of Cambridge.
Toshiko Mori
Toshiko Mori is the Robert P. Hubbard Professor in the Practice of Architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design and was chair of the Department of Architecture from 2002 to 2008. She is principal of Toshiko Mori Architect, which she established in 1981 in New York City. Mori taught at the Cooper Union School of Architecture from 1983, until joining the Harvard GSD faculty with tenure in 1995. She has been a visiting faculty member at Columbia University and Yale University, where she was the Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor in 1992. Mori has taught courses on the tectonics of textiles, materials and fabrication methods in architecture, structural innovations, and the role of architects as agents of change in a global context.
Her firm’s recent work includes master plans for the Brooklyn Public Library Central Branch and the Buffalo Botanical Gardens; “Thread: Artists’ Residency and Cultural Center” in Sinthian, Senegal; “Fass School and Teachers’ Residence” in Fass, Senegal; and the expansion of the Brown University Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Their projects have won awards from Architizer, The Plan, and AIA, and have been internationally exhibited, including at the 2012, 2014 and 2018 Venice Architecture Biennales. TMA has been listed in Architectural Digest’s biennial AD100 in 2014, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021, and in AN Interior’s Top 50 Architects. Recent publications include the Fass School and Teachers’ Residence in Architectural Record, the Mott Street Development in Architect’s Newspaper, and three features in Architectural Digest for the Fass School, Treeline a private art barn, and a beach house in Suffolk County, NY.
Mori’s strong research-based approach to design has been commended in invitations to lectures and conferences around the world. As a member and former chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Design, Mori has participated in sessions to discuss scarcity-driven design, the future of cities and urban information systems, design related to olfactory sensation and experience, and the role of the arts in improving communities. She has participated in international symposia and conferences, including panels held at the MoMA, Guggenheim Museum, and the G1 Summit in Japan. In 2010, Mori was selected to speak at the annual Women of Architecture lecture series at the National Building Museum. She has lectured at universities across the country and around the world.
Nikkei Business recently listed Mori as one of 50 Japanese Changing the World; Newsweek Japan listed her as one of 100 Japanese People the World Respects; and Forbes Japan featured her as one of 100 Self Made Women. Her work was featured in Monocle, in “Japan, Only the Best: The Nation Making a Difference in the World,” and was featured in Iconic Women of Design, a video series by the New York Times’ T Brand Studio. Her writing has appeared in A+U, The PLAN, and the World Economic Forum Agenda blog. In 2020, the firm published two new monographs, one for A+U magazine’s February 2020 issue, and another with ArchiTangle titled Toshiko Mori Architect: Observations.
Mori’s recent awards and honors include the Louis Auchincloss Prize from the Museum of the City of New York in 2020; the ACSA Tau Sigma Delta National Honor Society Gold Medal in 2016; Architectural Record’s Women in Design Leader Award in 2019; and the AIA / ASCA Topaz Medallion for Excellence in Architectural Education in 2019. Her project “Thread: Artists’ Residency and Cultural Center” was awarded the AIA 2017 Institute Honor Award for Architecture and was one of the winners of the inaugural FIBRA Award for Contemporary Plant Fiber-based Architecture in 2019. In May 2020, her project “Fass School and Teachers’ Residence” was featured by The Guardian as one of the world’s top 10 new architecture projects.
In 2009, she established a think tank, VisionArc, which connects local and global issues to mobilize design initiatives for a more sustainable future. The research aims to locate new opportunities to embed design into higher channels and broader fields of practice.
See projects at www.tmarch.com
Sergio Lopez-Pineiro
Sergio Lopez-Pineiro is an interdisciplinary architect, whose work explores voids as socio-spatial phenomena of freedom, diversity, and spontaneity.
Lopez-Pineiro is the director of Holes of Matter, a design studio operating at the intersection of architecture and landscape. It aims to look at the mutual influence between sociocultural forces and spatial organizations, and imagine existing and potential gaps to redefine relations between individual and collective forms of life. Lopez-Pineiro is a lecturer in landscape architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he teaches design studios and theory seminars on architecture and landscape with a focus on the public nature of the built environment. He has previously held the 2006-07 Reyner Banham Fellowship at the University at Buffalo and the 2014-15 Daniel Urban Kiley Fellowship at Harvard University.
Lopez-Pineiro is the author of the volume A Glossary of Urban Voids (Berlin: Jovis, 2020). His projects and texts have been published internationally by a+t, MAS Context, Bracket, arq: Architecture Research Quarterly, Places, 2G, and others, and his work has received support from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) and MacDowell. Lopez-Pineiro is a licensed architect in Spain. He trained at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid (ETSAM) and received his Master of Architecture degree from Princeton University, where he was awarded the Suzanne Kolarik Underwood Prize. He previously worked at No.mad in Madrid and Foreign Office Architects in London.
Grace La
Grace La is Professor of Architecture, Chair of the GSD’s Department of Architecture, former Chair of the Practice Platform, and former Director of the Master of Architecture Programs. She is also Principal of LA DALLMAN Architects, internationally recognized for the integration of architecture, engineering and landscape.
Cofounded with James Dallman, LA DALLMAN is engaged in catalytic projects of diverse scale and type. Noted for works that expand the architect’s agency in the civic recalibration of infrastructure, public space and challenging sites, LA DALLMAN was named as an Emerging Voice by the Architectural League of New York in 2010 and received the Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence Silver Medal in 2007. In 2011, LA DALLMAN was the first practice in the United States to receive the Rice Design Alliance Prize, an international award recognizing exceptionally gifted architects in the early phase of their career. LA DALLMAN has also been awarded numerous professional honors, including architecture and engineering awards, as well as prizes in international design competitions.
LA DALLMAN’s built work includes the Kilbourn Tower, the Miller Brewing Meeting Center (original building by Ulrich Franzen), the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) Hillel Student Center, the Ravine House, the Gradient House and the Great Lakes Future and City of Freshwater permanent science exhibits at Discovery World. The Crossroads Project transforms infrastructure for public use, including a 700-foot-long Marsupial Bridge, a bus shelter and a media garden. LA DALLMAN is currently commissioned to design additions to the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts (original building by Harry Weese and landscape by Dan Kiley), the 2013 Master Plan for the Menomonee Valley and the Harmony Project, a 100,000-square-foot hybrid arts building for professional dance, which includes a ballet school, a university dance program and a medical clinic. The National Endowment for the Arts awarded the Harmony Project a grant in support of the design process in 2012.
LA DALLMAN’s work has been featured in many publications including Architect, a+t, Architectural Record, Azure, Praxis and Topos, as well as in books released by Princeton Architectural Press and Routledge. Architect profiled the firm’s design culture in June, 2012. LA DALLMAN’s work has been widely exhibited, including at the Heinz Architectural Center in the Carnegie Museum of Art. La is coeditor and author of Skycar City (Actar, 2007), featuring the inaugural Marcus Prize Studio, which was exhibited at the 2008 Venice Biennale. She is also the cofounder and three-time editor of UWM’s Calibrations and a member of the editorial board of the Journal for Architectural Education.
Previously, La served as a faculty member in the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at UWM, receiving tenure in 2005. She served as the Chair of the Planning and Coordinating Committee, where she led efforts in the department’s strategic planning, curriculum reform and hiring initiatives. La also served as a Design Critic in Architecture at the GSD (2010) and a Visiting Critic at Syracuse University (2011). She has delivered lectures at prestigious universities and cultural institutions including the New Museum in New York City, the National Building Museum in Washington DC and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.
La’s teaching, research and prototype design work were funded by KI, exhibited at Discovery World, and featured in the annual Metropolis Conference at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (2010). Demonstrating a unique ability to link the profession and the academy, the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture has bestowed La with four Faculty Design Awards, which honor outstanding projects that advance the reflective nature of practice and teaching. Additionally, she has received numerous teaching awards including the 2005 UWM Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award.
La is a member of the United States General Services Administration (GSA) National Registry of Peer Professionals (class of 2010), which is comprised of the nation’s most distinguished private sector leaders in art, design, engineering and construction. She has also served as an adjudicator for the National Endowment for the Arts, the US Artists Fellowship and several AIA Design Awards Programs.
Grace La received her professional Master of Architecture with thesis distinction from the GSD, winning the Clifford Wong Housing Prize. She graduated with an AB, magna cum laude, from Harvard College in Visual and Environmental Studies.